Troy Brauntuch

Born in 1954 in Jersey (New Jersey, USA), Troy Brauntuch is seen, alongside artists like Richard Baim, Christopher Williams, Jenny Holzer, Jeff Koons, Cindy Sherman and Richard Prince as a member of the “Picture Generation” or “Reagan Generation,” as showcased by the exhibition A Forest of Signs / Art in the Crisis of Representation at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art in 1989. Their work is characterised by its deconstruction of the image, revealing the processes of its production and reproduction, or dissemination, and analysing the signs and referents involved. Troy Brauntuch sources his images from both the domestic and public spheres, breaking them down into minimal information units in order to transform them into photographs, drawings or (in his early work) paintings. Colour is generally reduced to tone-on-tone. The space of the represented subject is rendered in a range of values, from light to dark. The background becomes a depthless swathe of monochrome colour. Against it float objects whose lack of detail makes them indecipherable. But while the subjects are not clearly identifiable, these images of images nonetheless remain readable. Brauntuch plays on this ambiguity, and on the distinctive tension between the action of looking and that of grasping meaning.

For Troy Brauntuch’s first solo show in France, Le Magasin is presenting a selection of pieces in different media and from different periods, from the late 1970s to the present, in order to convey an idea of the work’s development and coherence. Exhibition catalogue : 144 pages, 100 ill., bilingual French/English, texts by Johanna Burton, Douglas Eklund (to be confirmed), Yves Aupetitallot, 27 x 28,5 cm, hardcover. Summer 2007.

Troy Brauntuch